If you smack somebody while smiling brightly, it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

As such, it must have stung Mayor Joe Fontana a little bit Monday as old ally Coun. Paul Van Meerbergen, with a jovial tone, criticized him for supporting a plan to create an arm’s-length body to handle a vaunted $120-million economic investment.

“You want to blow up this bureaucracy,” Van Meerbergen said before delivering a partisan potshot with a laugh mid-debate.

“You’re going back to your Liberal roots. We all had hope for you.”

Coun. Joe Swan chimed in on the mayor’s voting bloc — “I think we’re down to the Fontana 6” — and there was plenty of laughter, but Van Meerbergen’s comments underscored serious questions about the plan debated Monday.

City council has made it clear a $120-million push to build a stockpile of 200 hectares of shovel-ready industrial land, mostly along highways 401 and 402 and Veterans Memorial Parkway, is its top economic development priority. It could be sold to factories and other large employers.

The plan will require Ottawa and Queen’s Park to each chip in $40 million.

Monday, politicians debated city manager Art Zuidema’s report suggesting a new arm’s-length body under city control, akin to the London Economic Development Corp., be created to roll out the industrial land development strategy.

Though one expert told The Free Press he can’t see what such a body would do that isn’t being done now, Zuidema told politicians: “This is not about creating bureaucracy, it’s the opposite” in that it will streamline the services.

Fontana backs the proposal, and repeated a new phrase he’s used recently to describe his approach to local businesses.

Politicians voted 12-1 to have staff create a business plan for the proposed industrial land development corporation. Van Meerbergen was the lone opposed; Nancy Branscombe and Joni Baechler were absent.